Twitter has 2,400 advertisers

"Twitter makes money three ways, says Bain. Twitter sells promoted tweets, promoted trends, and ads. Many brands, for example, want to know how to increase their followers. "We've scaled from next to no advertisers to more than 2,400,' says Bain.  "We have about 100 folks working directly with advertisers and agencies all over.  We thought were going to have to answer the question, 'Why Twitter?' But no advertiser has that question.""

Source:  Twitter Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain, quoted in SFGate, 30th November 2011

Earlier - 1,600 advertisers announced in early October

Top 10 most Tweeted moments ever

As at 24th November 2011
(Rank - Event - Tweets per Second - Date)
"10 - Osama Bin Laden’s Death - 5,106 - 1st May 2011
9 - East Coast Earthquake - 5,449 - 23rd August 2011
8 - Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami - 5,530 - 14th March 2011
7 - Last Game of the 2011 NBA Finals - 5,531 - 12th June 2011
6 - UEFA Champions League (Final) - 6,303 - 28th May 2011
5 - 2011 BET Awards - 6,436 - 26th June 2011
4 - New Year’s Day, Japan - 6,939 - 1st January 2011
3 - Brazil Eliminated From Copa América - 7,166 - 17th July 2011
2 - FIFA Women’s World Cup - 7,196 - 17th July 2011
1 - Beyoncé Reveals Baby Bump - 8,868 - 28th August 2011"
Source:  BusinessInsider, 22nd November 2011

A Tweet from Selma Gomez generated 20,000 downloads of the Postcard on the Run mobile app

"Selena Gomez, the 19 year-old pop princess, actress and girlfriend of Justin Bieber, tweeted the above approbation for the iPhone application to her 8.3 million followers two weeks ago. Today, she informed the world that she too can play the celebrity investor and advisor part, and participated in Postcard on the Run’s $750,000 round of financing.
Postcard on the Run is a fresh, Los Angeles-based startup with iPhone and Android applications that lets you send real postcards to friends anywhere the world for $0.99 a piece. It has a few hooks including automatic address retrieval and “smell mail,” a feature that lets users add scratch-and-sniff scents to postcards.
The startup, which competes directly with Postagram and Apple’s similarly-purposed Cards app, now has Gomez, a powerful social media socialite — and possibly her even more influential boyfriend by association — in its corner. In addition to her Twitter legions, Gomez has nearly 25 million fans on Facebook. A Facebook update on today’s news nabbed 4,117 likes and 663 comments in four hours. Score one for Postcard on the Run.
The story goes that Gomez found the iPhone application on her own and loved it so much she tracked down founder Josh Brooks in September. The pair continued to chat and talks quickly turned to investment opportunities, Brooks told VentureBeat.
“She’s a fantastic partner for me,” Brooks said. Case in point: A recent tweet from Gomez netted the startup 20,000 downloads in 24 hours, he said."

Source:  VentureBeat, 17th November 2011

Most consumers in developed markets don't want to engage with brands in social media

"The race online has seen businesses across the world develop profiles on social networks, such as Facebook or YouTube, to speak to customers quickly and cheaply – but TNS’s research reveals that if  these efforts are not carefully targeted, they are wasted on half of them.
It found that 57 per cent of people*** in developed markets* do not want to engage with brands via social media – rising to 60 per cent in the US and 61 per cent in the UK. Instead, misguided digital strategies are generating mountains of digital waste, from friendless Facebook accounts to blogs no one reads.  This is being combined with ever-increasing content produced by consumers – the study shows 47 per cent of digital consumers now comment about brands online.
The result is huge volumes of noise, which is polluting the digital world and making it harder for brands to be heard – presenting a major challenge for businesses trying to enter into dialogue with consumers online.
“Winning and keeping customers is harder than ever,” said Matthew Froggatt, Chief Development Officer, TNS. He continued, “The online world undoubtedly presents massive opportunities for brands, however it is only through deploying precisely tailored marketing strategies that they will be able to realise this potential. Choosing the wrong channel, or simply adding to the cacophony of online noise, risks alienating potential customers and impacting business growth.”
TNS’s Digital Life study asked consumers around the world whether they actually want to engage with brands on social networking websites – either to find out more or to make a purchase.
Although 54 per cent of people*** admit social networks are a good place to learn about products, the research shows brands must harness digital more carefully if they are to use it to their advantage and deepen relationships with customers and prospects."

Source:  Data from the TNS Digital Life survey, reported in a press release, 10th November 2011

Access the full report through their interface here

Methodology:  

"*Developed markets: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States.

** Fast growth markets: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Columbia, Egypt, Estonia, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, Vietnam.

***This refers to Social Network Users only."

Chinese microblogging platform Weibo has 250m users

"Chinese internet company Sina (Nasdaq: SINA) has announced in its Q3 2011 earnings call that users on its Weibo microblogging platform exceeded 227 mln as of the end of September and recently reached 250 mln. Investment in marketing and R&D for Weibo more than doubled compared to Q3 2010, and CEO and president Charles Chao said costs will continue to rise over the next few quarters as Sina invests further in the platform.
As of the end of September, average daily posts rose from 75 mln to 86 mln, up 15% YoY. Overall traffic to the platform rose 23% YoY."

Source:  China News, Via Marbridge Daily, 9th November 2011

The average number of links for UK newspapers shared on social sites per week

"Average Social Links per Week of UK Newspaper Web sites
1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk (2,908,779 links/week)
2. www.guardian.co.uk (2,587,258 links/week)
3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk (879,783 links/week)
4. http://www.independent.co.uk (617,148 links/week)
5. http://www.thesun.co.uk (195,311 links/week)
6. http://www.ft.com (83,382 links/week)
7. http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk (82,151 links/week)
8. http://www.mirror.co.uk (54,881 links/week)
9. http://www.heraldscotland.com (13,063 links/week)
10. http://www.express.co.uk (9,600 links/week)
11. http://www.dailystar.co.uk (702 links/week)
12. http://www.thetimes.co.uk (256 links/week)"
Source:  Research by Searchmetrics, carried out over 10 weeks, reported by The Drum, 8th November 2011

Social media use by Fortune 500 companies - 62% use Twitter, 58% Facebook, and 23% have a blog

"A recent study from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth has found the adoption of social media usage among Fortune 500 companies has levelled off. Across multiple industries, usage of Twitter, Facebook and blogs in 2011 is level with or below that of 2010.
In 2010, 23 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a blog. In 2011, that figured remained unchanged at 23 percent. In 2010, 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a Twitter account. In 2011, 62 percent have an account. In 2010, 56 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a Facebook account. In 2011, 58 percent have an account."

Source:  Data from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, reported by Adrants, 2nd November 2011

7 of the 10 most followed people on Twitter are women

"# Name (Screen Name) Followers
1. Lady Gaga (ladygaga) 15,117,972
2. Justin Bieber (justinbieber) 13,868,314
3. Katy Perry (katyperry) 11,511,972
4. Barack Obama (BarackObama) 10,872,247
5. Kim Kardashian (KimKardashian) 10,735,244
6. Britney Spears (britneyspears) 10,662,045
7. Shakira (shakira) 9,802,132
8. Rihanna (rihanna) 9,055,660
9. taylorswift13 (taylorswift13) 8,759,295
10. ashton kutcher (aplusk) 8,028,802"
Source:  Retrieved from Twitaholic, 31st October 2011

Online buzz can drive ratings for TV shows

"An analysis conducted by NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey Company, and Nielsen looked at the correlation between online buzz and television ratings and found a statistically significant relationship throughout a TV show’s season among all age groups, with the strongest correlation among younger demos (people ages 12-17 and 18-34), and a slightly stronger overall correlation for women compared to men.  Men over 50 showed the weakest buzz-to-ratings connection leading up to a show’s premiere through the middle of the season, but that relationship strengthened by the finale as all age groups were actively discussing a TV show via social media.
Among people aged 18-34, the most active social networkers, social media buzz is most closely aligned with TV ratings for the premiere of a show.  A few weeks prior to a show’s premiere, a nine percent increase in buzz volume correlates to a one percent increase in ratings among this group.  As the middle of the season approaches and then the finale, the correlation is slightly weaker, but still significant, with a 14 percent increase in buzz corresponding to a one percent increase in ratings."

Source:  Research by NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey Company, and Nielsen, reported in Nielsen's blog, 6th October 2011

Coca Cola spends more than 20% of its media budget on social media

"It’s not just that you can’t control it—when you try, it backfires. You have to understand consumers: They would like to be heard. It’s a question of cocreating content. Five years ago social media was 3% of our total media spend. Today it’s more than 20% and growing fast."
Source:  Coca Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, reported by Harvard Business Review, October 2011

Twitter has 1,600 advertisers

"Twitter’s Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain took the stage at IAB’s Mixx Conference today and revealed a few milestones for the communications platform, specifically in the advertising area. Bain said that Twitter now has 1,600 advertisers using the platform to reach consumers, and currently has an 80 percent retention rate with advertisers. Back in July Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that the number of advertisers on Twitter had gone up by 600 percent, since last year when it was in the hundreds.
Back in March, Twitter partnered with Paramount Pictures to launch the trailer for new film SUPER 8 on Twitter. Bain also said today that Twitter helped Super 8 sell 1 million sneak peek tickets, and opening weekend box office exceeded projections by more than 50 percent."

Source:  Techcrunch, 4th October 2011

5 of the top 10 markets where most time is spent on social networking sites are in Latin America

"Latin Americans are strongly engaged with social networking. Half of the top 10 worldwide markets ranked by time spent on social networking sites are in Latin America, with Argentina leading the region at 10 hours per month in June 2011.
The Latin American social networking audience is nearly equal in its composition of males and females, but females account for a larger share of social networking time spent (53.6 percent) compared to males (46.4 percent). This trend was most significant in Brazil where females accounted for 58.7 percent of all social networking time spent.
People age 15-24 demonstrated the strongest engagement on social networks, accounting for nearly half (48.0 percent) of all time spent in the category. This trend was most significant in Venezuela where visitors age 15-24 accounted for 3 of every 5 social networking minutes (58.2 percent).
Facebook.com strongly led the social networking market in Latin America, reaching more than 91 million visitors. Windows Live Profile ranked #2 with more than 35.5 million visitors in the region. Orkut held the #3 spot with 34.4 million visitors, largely driven by the site’s popularity in Brazil, while Twitter.com ranked #4 with 24.3 million visitors.
Five of the top 10 markets ranked by Facebook.com reach are in Latin America. Facebook reached 90.9 percent of all online users in Chile, ranking as the most penetrated market in Latin America.
In Brazil, Orkut ranked as the most-visited social networking destination, reaching 35.7 million visitors, an increase of 20 percent from June 2010. Facebook.com, which is the second largest social networking site in Brazil, witnessed strong growth increasing 192 percent to 24.5 million visitors.
Venezuela is the only country in Latin America in which Twitter.com rises to second place in the social networking ranking. One in four online users in Venezuela visited Twitter.com in June (26.5 percent reach).
Recently launched Google+ reached 28 million visitors worldwide in the first 33 days of its public existence (June 29, 2011 to July 31, 2011). Brazil ranked as the sixth largest market for the site globally, contributing 793,923 visitors."
Source:  Press release from comScore, 20th September 2011

The American Social Media Landscape

The Social Media Landscape

View more presentations from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

How email and social media influence purchase decisions

"Kantar Media Compete's study also found that nearly one in three consumers receive more than 20 emails from retailers in a week. And in good news for retailers relying on email, 89 percent of respondents at least occasionally click through to a retail site from an email or visit a retail site immediately after reading an email.
SMS, on the other hand, is still a largely untapped channel for brands to reach shoppers. During a typical week, three out of four consumers (72.2 percent) don't receive any text messages from retailers.
Do social networking sites influence purchase decisions? Yes. In fact, 35 percent of respondents say that Twitter feeds have been influential or extremely influential on purchase decisions, while 23.5 percent say that Facebook has been influential or extremely influential on purchase decisions."
Source:  Data from Kantar Compete, published in a press release, 13th September 2011
Note - All data is for the US only

Twitter has 100m monthly & 50m daily active users

"Twitter has 100 million active users logging in at least once a month and 50 million active users every day, CEO Dick Costolo revealed Thursday.
The microblogging service has a total of 200 million registered users, but how many of those are actually regulars has been open to debate for some time. Costolo, in an informal chat with tech reporters he called his “state of the union,” revealed that exactly half of them log in monthly — a number he says is up 82% since the beginning of the year.
The CEO offered a whole raft of statistics to prove that Twitter is healthy and growing like a weed — especially on mobile platforms. Some 55 million users log on to Twitter from their phone or tablet every month. Web-based users are on the rise, too: Twitter.com now sees 400 million visitors a month, up from 250 million at the beginning of the year, Costolo says.
Less than 40% of users have not tweeted in the last month, according to the CEO, preferring to simply follow the timelines of others. “We’re excited about that number,” Costolo says. “That’s super healthy.”"
Source:  Mashable, 8th September 2011

The 'half life' of a popular link shared on Twitter is 3 hours

"We can evaluate the persistence of the link by calculating what we’re calling the half life: the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak. For this link the half life was 70 minutes, which captures all the clicks between the grey lines on the graph above.
Let’s look at a second link - East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia - , this one first shared by the Washington Post on Twitter.
Rate of clicks per minute on “East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia”
While the exact details of the traffic are a little different, and the scale of the traffic to this link is much larger, we see essentially the same pattern: a fast rise, and a more relaxed drop-off. Noticeably though this link a half life of only 5 minutes: after 5 minutes this link had seen half of the clicks it would ever see.
This link is associated with a very timely event (an earthquake on the US East Coast) as opposed to the previous link (pictures of otters and kittens are clearly interesting all the time). We think that this difference in content drives the difference in dynamics of these two links. However, one alternative theory that comes up again and again is that the dynamics of the link traffic depend on where the link is posted: do links posted on facebook last longer than they do on twitter?
So we looked at the half life of 1,000 popular bitly links and the results were surprisingly similar. The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours. So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on facebook than if you post on twitter."

Source:  Analysis by Bitly, reported on their blog, 6th September 2011

The average American Apple household has 4 Apple devices

"Frequent mobile video users will more than triple over the next five years
Nearly 50% of 18 to 24 year old smartphone/tablet owners frequently social network about TV programs currently being viewed
86% of smartphone/tablet users will view video on their mobile devices
Nearly 60% of smartphone/tablet owners will also be viewing OTT (over-the-top) video at home
The average Apple household will have four Apple devices, while the average Google Android household will have at least two Android devices"

Source:  Research by In-Stat, reported in a press release, 30th August 2011

Beyonce's pregnancy news created a record of 8,868 tweets per second during the 2011 VMA Awards

Click to enlarge

Source:  Tweet from Twitter Global PR, 29th August 2011

72% of people active on Twitter daily publish blog posts at least once a month

"Who are Twitter users and why are they so important to your brand?
Of the users who are active on Twitter daily:
72% publish blog posts at least once a month
70% comment on others’ blog posts
61% write at least one product review a month
61% comment on news sites
56% write articles for third-party sites
53% post videos online
50% make contributions to wiki sites
48% share deals found through coupon forums
In essence: What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter."

Source:  Data from Exact Target, reported by The Next Web, 18th August 2011

UK riots led to the highest ever British usage figures for Twitter

"Although people were glued to the news sites for updates on the unrest, it was Twitter which has benefited the most from traffic as a result of the unrest in London. The real-time sharing of information through Twitter has made the platform the ideal discussion platform to spread updates on major news events like the riots, and yesterday (8 August) was Twitter’s biggest ever spike in UK traffic online.
Twitter accounted for 1 in every 170 UK Internet visits yesterday; by our estimations there were over 3.4 million visits to the Twitter homepage from the UK population alone. To put that in context, Twitter received 15% more visits yesterday than it did around the super-injunctions scandal, the previous biggest spike in its UK history.
Somewhat unusually, the spike in traffic to Twitter was not repeated on other social media websites, especially Facebook. Looking at our postcode data helps to explain why this might be. Twitter is used widely across the UK but the most prolific Twitter users are located in London postcodes."

Source:  Data from Hitwise, reported on their blog, 9th august 2011